


refugees you and me

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Cuddling & Snuggling, Fugitives, Holding Hands, Howling Commandos - Freeform, Hurt Steve Rogers, Inspired by Poetry, Introspection, M/M, Memories, On the Run, Poetry, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovered Memories, Steve Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers Recovering, rainier maria rilke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 12:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10639557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: On the run from everyone else, away from the Avengers and from Wakanda, Bucky Barnes spends a night looking after an injured Steve Rogers.He spends the night with the memories that he is still slowly recovering.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luninosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/gifts).



> Happy happy birthday, my dearest [@luninosity](http://luninosity.tumblr.com/)!

Go back.

You are a monster.

Go back to the darkness that created you.

Go back to the ice and the cold and the sleep.

Go back to the monsters, and be a monster.

And he opens his eyes and he clenches his hands into fists. Bones grinding against each other on the right. Metal whining and resisting on the left. 

He’s still not used to sleeping in a person-sized bed, which would still have given him some room to sprawl, because he used to sleep -– if that cryopreservation darkness could ever have been called sleep -– in a coffin, in a cage, in a freezing bleak blank black tube that was just wide enough for his shoulders, if at all.

And today he’s not even sleeping right in the middle of that person-sized bed, because there is someone else in that bed with him.

The stains on the bandages wrapped around Steve Rogers’s midsection have mostly faded into brown.

Steve Rogers: here and now, with pain in the lines around his eyes even as he continues to -– not wake up.

Bucky Barnes -– the Winter Soldier -– someone who was somewhere between those two, maybe -– sits up very carefully, and very quietly, and keeps looking.

The night is close and muggy and smothering, and there’s only a faint hint of a breeze in the room because the window’s been cracked open a little, because there’s an electric fan whirring and wheezing away in the corner, its moving air mostly directed at Steve.

This place smells of food cooking at odd hours. Is filled with chatter and the sounds of televisions and radios going all night long. Its stars washed out in neon-smudged light pollution. People come and go in thin clothes or else go about soaked in sweat.

Bucky’s rather all right with being soaked in sweat, he thinks, as long as he’s not soaked in sweat because of his nightmares, or the terrors that infest his mind, the terrors of the memories coming back to him: drugs pumped into his veins to make him strong and angry and obedient and compliant and enduring, and then the resistance in the trigger of a gun -– the resistance of muscle and sinew to a blade or some other stabbing instrument, not necessarily honed to a fine sharp edge --

Another breath of overheated air. He makes himself calm down. Sometimes he does it with verses: he whispers to himself in Spanish and in French and in Chinese and in Japanese and in English, and right now he thinks, weaving from language to language and all too easily falling into German --

It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,  
to no longer practice customs barely acquired,  
not to give a meaning of human futurity  
to roses, and other expressly promising things:  
no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,  
and to set aside even one’s own  
proper name like a broken plaything.  
Strange: not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange  
to see all that was once in place, floating  
so loosely in space. And it’s hard being dead,  
and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels  
a little eternity. Though the living  
all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.  
Angels (they say) would often not know whether  
they moved among living or dead. The eternal current  
sweeps all the ages, within it, through both the spheres,  
forever, and resounds above them in both.

Lyrical thoughts, soothing ones, such a far far cry from the harsh and dismissive voices that still reverberate in his nightmares.

On the bed next to him, the lines in Steve Rogers’s face deepen. A series of winces. There is pain stamped into the corners of his mouth, in the hard lines of his jaw. 

For some reason he wants to reach out to Steve Rogers. To hold him in one way or another.

And what a new thought that is.

Fleeing into the noise and the garbled meanings of the world after their time in Wakanda. After waking up from his self-imposed sleep and exile, and seeing -– the first thing he’d seen after coming into the world again -– the grief of Steve Rogers. 

So he had stumbled towards this man who might have been his friend -– who had now defied the entire world for him -– and he had said, “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” And it had taken so much for Steve Rogers to say those two words.

“Disappear,” he’d said.

And for the most part they had. Living in the tropics so he doesn’t have to think about ice except as something he needs to cool his drinks. Living hidden in cramped little rooms, some empty basement or other -– once next to a babbling river that was still miraculously unpolluted, though it had no fish to offer either as food or as things to look at. 

But luck always runs out, and he remembers, vaguely, the shadows and the threats of old attempts to escape: and maybe that was why he’d rushed at the men in black who had shot at Steve Rogers -– bullets for some, and poison for at least one. Maybe that was why he’d broken their necks, his hands moving like fury and like crushing regret as he snatched their lives away from them. 

And so: here and now. Himself in this room and Steve Rogers taking up most of the bed, sleeping and unresting, fighting off the effects of that poison.

One good thing about medical experimentation, which seems to be one thing that they share: poison runs through their veins and slashes at them from the inside, and eventually drains harmlessly away, metabolized and released.

Until then, though, they suffer.

“Story of our lives,” Bucky hears himself say, and the words are rusty and strange and all too familiar. Some part of him must have said them over and over again. Or some part of him must have heard them over and over again. The shapes of the words are familiar and -– more importantly -– so are the shapes of the thoughts in his mind that are linked to those words.

For some reason, those thoughts, those memories, incomplete as they are, move him to speak.

“You were -– thin. Sickly. You were recovering from another bout of flu. I brought you -– something. I can’t remember what it was. But you held on to it like it was a thousand pieces of gold.”

Bucky passes his hand over his eyes.

“And then we were in Europe. The war was going on. They hadn’t taken me away yet.” He shivers despite the heat. Thinking about HYDRA always chills him to the bones, always freezes him with his unspeakable rage. “I was on patrol. I was the sentry. It was night and the snow was falling. You were almost asleep, and you were so tired, and you told me to eat your share of dinner.”

As if multiplying upon themselves, as if birthing themselves, the memories bubble up in steadier and steadier streams.

“You were a very small boy. You were covered in flour in someone’s kitchen. Everyone was trying not to laugh because you were sneezing, and your nose was running, and you left white handprints on everyone who walked past you, and you were smiling at everyone.

“You were angry, when we were growing up. You got into fights because someone had insulted -– me. Maybe not me, but someone who was connected to me. You always got beat bloody. You still kept picking those fights.

“You fell asleep during the Easter Vigil, and no one wanted to wake you up, because you looked like you were comfortable. Like you were at peace.

“Bad night in the Alps, and some of us had been shot up, and you walked around learning to become a medic, and you couldn’t stitch anyone up but you were good with bandages. You were good with encouraging people.”

Words like bandages, Bucky thinks, and he glances at the fresh rolls on the bedside table, rolls piled on a beat-up tin that contained a makeshift field first-aid kit. He had ventured into a store. He had pretended that he was moving in, and he’d spoken to the store owner and the words in Filipino fell from his lips, correct and just a little unsure, and he’d also been pointed to a place where he could get something to eat, when he was done fumbling in his pockets for the money he owed. 

The package of soft white buns sits in its plastic wrapping, on the other small table in this wooden-planked room. He’d tried one, cold: salt and oddly sweet flavors on his tongue, and meat smothered in a dark brown sauce that was almost solid. He’d been given instructions to reheat the thing, and he had ignored those instructions because hunger had been gnawing at him and leaving him shaking with nerves.

He thinks he might want one more, in the here and now, and he glances sidelong at Steve Rogers in his sleep. Reaches for another white bun. This time he’s careful to tear off the square of paper on the underside before taking a bite.

The question comes to him without warning, and he lets it fall from his lips.

“Why do you keep saving my life?”

Silence as he chews on the bun.

Sweat trickles down the back of his neck, and he makes himself get up and drink a glass of water. Two glasses. The water is lukewarm and when he pours too much, when he spills it onto the floor, he touches it with his left hand and it’s like feeling nothing at all except for the wetness.

He sits on the floor, now, keeps Steve Rogers within sight.

While he knows that time keeps marching on -– he can hear it in the pulse of his blood through his veins, he can feel it with every time he exhales and the air that he’d held in his body wafts away and into the past -– he also feels like nothing really exists in this place, not even time. Just the heat and the humidity and the reality that is Steve Rogers, sleeping, unaware.

Trusting him to watch.

He remembers that night of sentry duty, having drawn first watch over the weary laughter of the others. Marching all day and all night just to find this clearing in a snowed-over grove: just enough space for three people to make hollows in the ground to sleep in. His hands cramping around his rifle, and the snow melting in his boots. There was no fire, just the cupped flickering vanishing lights of matches struck and sizzling away into temporary flares. 

He’d gotten back to the clearing just in time for Monty to hand him a dented hip flask -– and he hadn’t even stopped to ask what it contained. Just put it to his mouth for a hasty half-swallow. Warmth and acrid fumes burning in his chest for a moment, and still being unable to relax. He’d eyed every corner of their makeshift camp, too alert, too wound up for action, wondering where the enemies could be when they hadn’t appeared at all during their long trek.

Maybe the enemies were lying in wait for them, lulling them into a false sense of peace before falling upon them --

“Bucky,” and that had been a voice he knew. A voice he could still trust, even before Azzano.

And especially after.

And the Steve Rogers in his memory is -– large, and worn down, and tired enough not to care about the lines in his face, the weights of the world and of his duties dragging down the corners of his smile.

“Eat,” Steve Rogers had said.

And Bucky had eaten, quietly, not wanting to challenge him despite the worry that also still prowled down his nerves.

He finishes off his white bun in the here and now, and that worry is still on his shoulders even now.

In the grove, he’d curled into the hole in the ground left by Dum Dum, just inches away from Steve Rogers.

In the now, he grasps the hand of Steve Rogers. Nothing to offer except himself, warts and all, and it’s all he’s got and he’s more than willing to offer everything.

Eventually, Bucky sleeps.

(He wakes up and somehow he’s being held close by Steve Rogers. He’s holding Steve Rogers close.

(It’s enough, and more than enough.)


End file.
